I wrote a popular post on 10 years of Microsoft data center executives. Writing about Google’s data center executives is a good follow up.
Google’s current Data Center executive leadership are Urs Hoelzle, Ben Treynor, and Joe Kava. Urs has no LinkedIn profile, but he does have a wikipedia post and has been with Google since the beginning being Google employee #8. The data center group is part of Ben Treynor’s organization. Ben joined Google in 2003. VP of Data Centers is Joe Kava, joining Google in 2008.
Urs posted on its Google datacenter in 1999.
Urs Hölzle
Shared publicly - Feb 4, 201415 years ago (on Feb 1st, 1999) I first set foot in a Google datacenter. Well, not really -- in the Google cage in the Exodus datacenter in Santa Clara. Larry had led me there for a tour (I wasn't an employee yet) and it was my first time in any datacenter. And you couldn't really "set foot" in the first Google cage because it was tiny (7'x4', 2.5 sqm) and filled with about 30 PCs on shelves. a1 through a24 were the main servers to build and serve the index and c1 through c4 were the crawl machines.
It is not easy to find who were people who were data center executives from 1999 to 2003. Ben Treynor in 2003 was the start of the site reliability engineering at Google and according to Ben’s linkedin profile he picked up the data center group in 2010 and in 2014 is responsible for the Google Cloud.
Vice President, Engineering
October 2003 – Present (11 years 1 month)Mountain View, CA
Responsibilities:
Site Reliability Engineering: 2003-present
Global Networking: backbone, egress, datacenter, and corporate: 2004-present
Global Datacenters: construction, engineering & operations: 2010-present
Global Servers: operations 2010-present
Google Cloud: 2014-present
Joe Kava has been the consistent presenter from Google on what is happening in the data center group, presenting at 7x24 Exchange, Uptime Symposium, Datacenter Dynamics, and many other industry events.
Vice President - Data Centers
April 2008 – Present (6 years 7 months)Mountain View, California
Responsible for design, engineering, construction, operations and sustainability for Google's global data centers.